Class actions charged against NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) reveal that the two companies may have staged a competition over the past half-a-decade or so. A judge read out an email which suggested price fixing was rife in the graphics card market. That follows a class action of 51 different plaintiffs, now combined into one, and across different legal jurisdictions, alleging cartel behaviour not only in graphics chips, but flat panels and CRTs too.

In other words, NVIDIA and ATI may have been fixing prices of their products for a while now, it is believed that they held secret meetings to discuss staged competition, chart out prices, timings of product launches among other things. These pseudo-competitions staged provided improved sales among other things. A PDF File available to us at this point shows that the two indulged in conspiracy to mutually benefit from staged competition, so as to:

Fix, stabilize, and maintain prices of products in the US Market.

Artificial inflation of product prices.

Provided, are charts that show price-spread between NVIDIA and ATI products. Three major time-scales: Before the 'conspiracy period', during and after a federal grand jury launched an investigation and issued subpoenas to both companies:

Of course, the latest price-cut of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 series products doesn't seem to have been taken into account, the price spread between NVIDIA and ATI with their highest-offerings is zero.

Antec NeoHe 550-manufactured by seasonic -replacement to the discontinued smart power series

Software:

Windows XP pro SP2 -- vista is still crap

wow it makes sense.. this why nvidia and ati always seem to pop out new products out of the blue to go head on with the other.. and would explain by nvidia and amd are "buddying" when it comes to the cuda and physx, and why they haven't had any suits against each other, dispite all of the bad stuff each of them have done to each other.

We all know what was going on in 2003. Just how many $500 cards we released in that year. I lost count after 5 by each company. That seemed to go on forever, until the 8 series NV cards broke it open & AMD when back to the drawing board. At some point they can't call it competition anymore. Its definitely competition now but what was going on back then was pretty damn apparent. This is what happens when one co tries to break the manotony.

Think about it: Two big companies with no main competitors other than each other get together and figure out a way to bring in the most cash. Obviously the most blunt way would be raising the price of their products. Usually when the price of a product goes up it's because of a few reasons: Manufacturing cost, and availability. Here, they were simply raising the price for no reason other than maximum return.

If this is all true, we've all basically been getting reemed with no lube for a very long time.

I thought it was obvious. They just started to throw rocks at each other again when NV broke the mold with the 8 series. AMD couldn't keep up anymore so all bets were off. Between 2002 & 2007, the price difference between those 2 idiots' high-end model was nil.

There was none of this I come out with a $800 card that reigns for a year which gets eaten by a $450 card just to be trumped by a $600 card which is upgraded to a $650 card which is utterly destroyed by a $500 card.

Life sucks AMD & NV doesn't it. They would have probably never found out if the 2 idiots didn't start to fight like cats & dogs.

I hope Larrabee breaks this stuff up. Its OK now, since both companies are feeling the effects of their own BS but it could go back to it at anytime. They are already bitching about the CUDA stuff - That means they are actually talking to each other Its headed that way again, where we see another set of 5 $500 cards , that are not worth it.

If this doesn't go down, the G300 & R800 could very well be the same price at launch. That's when we know they are doing it again, especially when NV is keeping a track on AMD's prices. It probably happened that way at first, but continuing it for 5 yrs is unforgivable. The FXs were not worth it at all & the prices for the 2900s made me sick.

nothing new the same is in oil branch and who's sue the few big supplier?nobody even they recognize that the price is not normal they're selling double why not if are buyers and this can be extended to almost any product

if anyone made a product before sell 1st he made a market/price research to adjust his price and if the market can hold a 100% win (based on a similar but not identical product) i bet he wouldn't sell it with a 30% margin;people don't know the manufacturing cost for this reason

I think we need another GPU manu. so we can have more competition, cheaper prices and more fanboy flamewars(cause I think there funny )

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someone call up matrox & tell them how much the enthusiast market is missing them. Matrox have long since confined themselves to a box we call 'industry' - they need to take up arms & come out with a pincer move against ATi/Nv to show the world their absence has not been for nothing....

either that or one of the 3rd party companies like HiS & XFX, GeCube etc etc need to step out & start makin their own graphics cards.....

I thought the 2900's were a bit cheap to be honest, maybe not for the performance tho. It all makes sense now. Watch these two gang up on intel.

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They were cheap, when they were compared to the 8 series. Who knew they had that GTX up their sleeves when the 7900s ended up bombing with a dual disaster. This is when the pricing BS ended. But NV ended up going into another universe of prices with the 8 series. The performance over anything else may have warranted it but I know I didn't like it one bit. It only took 2 generations for AMD to catch up, but now since they did it could easily go back.

Both companies need to price there cards according to what they will do (& how much we will pay for them). Having them locked-in w/o that real value only leaves the customer hanging out to dry. These relatively high NV prices over the last 3 yrs may have put us out of perspective of what these things should cost.